The Abbott government will increase the $140 million Labor allocated for the 2015 commemoration of the defeat at Gallipoli 100 years ago.

More than 60,000 Australians died in World War I; 8700 at Gallipoli and 45,000 in France. Britain will spend $94 million on remembering its 870,000 military dead in World War I. But the Coalition will increase the $140 million for Gallipoli by lifting a special spending program from $100,000 per electorate to $125,000.

Remembrance is important – the deaths beyond Gallipoli should be included. But lessons still need drawn about how to avoid repeating what Malcolm Turnbull has called “the horror of Fromelles, that most cataclysmic of Australian military campaigns, where 5533 Australians would die between one nightfall and the next — possibly the worst 24 hours in our nation’s history". Care is also needed to address concerns the 2015 program unduly reflects contentious claims that the failed attempt to invade Turkey at Gallipoli marked Australia’s birth as a nation.

Australia became a nation in more than a formal sense with the achievement of Federation in 1901 and a wide array of social, economic and cultural developments before 1915.

Speaking at the War Memorial on Monday, Paul Keating said, “There was nothing missing in our young nation that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us . . . We were moving through the processes of federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness; suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive patriotism."

Nationhood’s resonances

Keating argued that this sense of nationhood brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas such as Federation architecture.

He said the troops’ bravery in 1915 should not be reduced to some idealised or jingoistic version of what their lives really meant.

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As PM, however,
Julia Gillard
gave unqualified support to every expeditionary war involving Australians since the NSW government sent a contingent of troops to a colonial conflict in Sudan in 1885. Gillard said the deployment was “not only a test of wartime courage, but a test of character, that has helped define our nation and create the sense of who we are".

Far from testing wartime courage or making us who we are, the deployment was a farce – the NSW contingent to Sudan arrived too late to see any real action.

Kevin Rudd
showed his kinder and gentler side when announcing his parliamentary retirement on Wednesday. But as PM, he glibly supported using force on a potentially more horrific scale than the WWI slaughter. In a leaked US record of a 2009 conversation over lunch with then-secretary of state
Hillary Clinton
, Rudd called himself a “brutal realist" and almost casually countenanced going to war if “everything goes wrong" with attempts to integrate China into the global community. A genuine realist would be less sanguine about a war that could kill millions, wreck the world economy and require the subjugation of the Chinese.

Shortly before becoming PM,
Tony Abbott
took a much more mature approach when he said governments had to be “incredibly careful about any commitment of the armed forces". This is not inconsistent with his promise to bolster Australia’s military strength and the associated deterrence, provided he doesn’t confuse massive spending on local naval ship-building with improved capability. Abbott shows signs of understanding why the 1986 Dibb Report assessed Indonesia as the country “from or through which a military threat to Australia could most easily be posed". But he has started scratchily. His immigration minister
Scott Morrison
has complained publicly “there’s no real rhyme or reason" to Jakarta’s reluctance to accept the return of asylum seekers. After Indonesia opposed electronic eavesdropping by our embassy in Jakarta, Abbott wrongly said all our intelligence operations are legal.

Abbott must abandon TPP

In this context Fairfax Media reported on Thursday that detailed documents from WikiLeaks on the US-led Trans Pacific Partnership trade and investment negotiations could leave Australians paying more for medicines, movies, computer games and software. The details show Australia repeatedly backed protectionist US positions on intellectual property against the objections of Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam.

Despite a bipartisan parliamentary report in June recommending that Australia amend its copyright law to ensure consumers can circumvent technological protection measures that increase prices,

Fairfax Media reported the government backed US moves to criminalise such measures.

Far from enhancing free trade, these measures damage the economy, as do the US attempts to extend patent protection for pharmaceuticals via the TTP. The US also wants this pact to extend copyright protection to an absurd 120 years in some cases.

John Howard
agreed to expand protectionist measures in the misnamed Australia-US Free Trade Agreement. But he rejected intense US pressure to include investor-state dispute settlement provisions because he believed they would violate the nation’s sovereignty by allowing foreign corporations to use a non-judicial body to overturn Australian laws. But the Abbott government is willing to include such provisions.

In an interview with The Australian Financial Review earlier this year, former World Bank head
James Wolfensohn
questioned the wisdom of supporting the US decision to exclude China and India from the TTP.

Australia’s interests aren’t served by such a divisive pact rejecting free trade. Excluding China and India only exacerbates international tensions. Abbott should abandon the TPP.